Every so often a sentence jumps out at me, stops me in my tracks and makes me utter a silent swear. The most recent sentence to do this to me was buried away towards the end of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, the story of the downfall of Lehman Brothers. The sentence reads: “The economy of Ireland crashed, making the short years of prosperity look like a mere blip in a poverty-studded history.”

Wow.

Is that it? Has the Irish economy crashed, and were those glorious years of €15 plates of pasta, boutique hotels and Italian coffee from paper cups merely a blip? Has normal service resumed? And, if so, how can businesses influence and control it?

My main motivation for setting up this website was to create a place where I could put together the tools I use in my work as a freelance researcher and writer, as well as the things which I enjoy when I’m not working. I hope it will become a repository or an archive of facts, figures, opinions and forecasts for my clients. It will pull together articles I’ve written, speeches I’ve delivered and thoughts which I’ve had. But, one thing at a time.

The underlying theme of this website, and my work, is that the Irish economy is changing, people like Larry McDonald who wrote the sentence I quoted earlier, are making forecasts about what’s happening. My own view is that the more we understand that change, the better positioned we will be to cope with it. My job is not to join the ranks of those who make forecasts (although I’ll do that), but rather it’s to help companies gather information about what impact the changing economy will have on their businesses.

So, that’s what I’m doing. Helping businesses with their research needs. Helping them understand what is happening in the changing economy. A full list of services is somewhere else on this site, as are a few recent economic indicators. Life, as someone recently said, is what happens between blog posts, but I’ll update them when I can.